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Customer Alliance at the HSMA Hotelcamp 2014

Once again, the Hotelcamp took place opened it's doors for people interested in tourism and hospitality industry

October, 2014

Last weekend, the Hotelcamp 2014 took place in the little town Bendorf/ Koblenz within the German state Rhineland-Palatinate. As a premium sponsor of the event, it was self-explanatory for Customer Alliance to join the event being represented by Katharina (Senior Sales Manager) and Leonie (Account Manager).

Arriving friday afternoon, we got together in the Hotel Friends Mittelrhein. With about 110 participants, the 6th Hotel Camp was the biggest of all times, but still provided the relaxed atmosphere for which it is well known.

As it is common for a BarCamp, we met saturday morning to collect the topics we wanted to discuss during the weekend. In four parallel meeting rooms everyone was invited to join the different sessions and exchange information, know-how, opinions and to give advice.

Of course, we followed the first rule of the HotelCamp “speak about it, post and tweet about it”. It was nice to follow the live-tweets of the sessions that took place in the rooms next door.

Obviously, the focus of our interest was on those topics which are relevant for online hotel management. Thus, we attended discussions about:

booking.com as a potential partner for hotels

the necessity of internal and external reviews and its optimal handling

how to get a better website conversion/ direct bookings

conversion through Social Media

optimization of OTAs

new ways for effective monitoring

the use of Google Ananlytics for hotels

strategies to raise consumer acceptance regarding cold calls

Take a brief look on the key findings we could pick up on the Hotelcamp:

Review management

Note: Asking guests in the hotel or offer goodies for writing a review decreases the quality of reviews.

As a hotelier, you have to explain your employees why they have to ask guests for mail-adresses/reviews and make sure that they understand why & how to do that.

In order to influence guests to rate positively in general, your wording should not be: „please review us“, but rather: „please recommend us“.

Furthermore, your mailing text should include an explanation on why to write a review (e.g. „your review helps us to motivate the team“ and even more important „your review helps future guests to make a decision for their stay“

The HotelCamp 2014 was a big success, praised and complimented by all attendees at the feedback meeting on Sunday .
We want to give a big thanks to the HSMA organizer team and the great staff of the Hotel Friends Mittelrhein, who made the event such a great experience for all of us.
We are looking forward to use the new input and have marked the date for the Hotel Camp 2015!